Saturday, February 20, 2021

Show HN: ClubCircle – gradient borders and status badges for Clubhouse avatars https://ift.tt/3ayVZOs

Show HN: ClubCircle – gradient borders and status badges for Clubhouse avatars https://clubcircle.app February 20, 2021 at 02:53AM

Show HN: Crypto Mining Pools Aggregator https://ift.tt/3uc77J0

Show HN: Crypto Mining Pools Aggregator https://ift.tt/3azwIUD February 19, 2021 at 07:33PM

Free Muni and Paratransit to COVID-19 Vaccine Appointments

Free Muni and Paratransit to COVID-19 Vaccine Appointments
By Phillip Pierce

image of bus with headway sign stating "masks required"

Free Muni and Paratransit to COVID-19 Vaccine Appointments

Starting on Tuesday, February 23, Muni and Paratransit will be free for those traveling to get vaccinated for COVID-19. This includes trips in both directions. The SFMTA is also providing additional access to taxi service for those who use the Essential Trip Card.

These rides are good for trips to the city-sponsored high-volume vaccine sites, hospitals or anywhere else that is offering vaccines. More information on the city-sponsored sites as well as directions on how to get there can be found on the city vaccination website.

We know that getting San Franciscans vaccinated is the city’s highest priority. This program is designed to eliminate transportation and cost barriers to receiving this life-changing vaccine.

How to Ride on Muni

Use our trip planner or service map to find the best way to get to your vaccination destination. Simply catch the bus and head to where you need to go. Please have your vaccine appointment confirmation or instructions ready in case SFMTA staff asks to see your proof of payment.

Paratransit

Paratransit rides on SF Access van service to and from vaccination appointments will be free for eligible participants. Paratransit van riders must call to make a trip reservation and indicate that they are going to get their COVID-19 vaccine. Staff will make a note in their records to alert the driver that the rider does not need to pay a fare for their trip.

Paratransit taxi riders will have $60 loaded onto their taxi debit card, which will be valid for up to six months, to get to and from their vaccine appointment. Funds should be available starting next week. If you are a paratransit taxi rider and have a question about the value on your card or want to confirm if the additional value has been added, you may call 415.351.7000 or check your card’s transaction history on the SF Paratransit Taxi online portal

More information can be found on the SFMTA Paratransit website.

Essential Trip Card

The Essential Trip Card (ETC) already subsidizes about two to three round trips by taxi per month for older adults (persons 65 and older) and people with disabilities. Eligible participants pay 20% of the taxi fare for essential taxi trips. To pay, each rider is issued an ETC debit card, which they can load with value every month.  If ETC participants think that the cost of their trips to vaccine appointments will require more funds than they can currently load each month, they can add $60 of additional funds, at the cost of $12 to the rider, one time only. Existing ETC customers can add this new value on-line, by phone or by mail, same as usual. New applicants can sign-up by calling 311.



Published February 20, 2021 at 12:10AM
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Friday, February 19, 2021

Launch HN: MindsDB (YC W20) – Machine Learning Inside Your Database https://ift.tt/2ZuqrTN

Launch HN: MindsDB (YC W20) – Machine Learning Inside Your Database Hi HN, Adam and Jorge here, and today we’re very excited to share MindsDB with you ( https://ift.tt/2UJWtY6 ). MindsDB AutoML Server is an open-source platform designed to accelerate machine learning workflows for people with data inside databases by introducing virtual AI tables. We allow you to create and consume machine learning models as regular database tables. Jorge and I have been friends for many years, having first met at college. We have previously founded and failed at another startup, but we stuck together as a team to start MindsDB. Initially a passion project, MindsDB began as an idea to help those who could not afford to hire a team of data scientists, which at the time was (and still is) very expensive. It has since grown into a thriving open-source community with contributors and users all over the globe. With the plethora of data available in databases today, predictive modeling can often be a pain, especially if you need to write complex applications for ingesting data, training encoders and embedders, writing sampling algorithms, training models, optimizing, scheduling, versioning, moving models into production environments, maintaining them and then having to explain the predictions and the degree of confidence… we knew there had to be a better way! We aim to steer you away from constantly reinventing the wheel by abstracting most of the unnecessary complexities around building, training, and deploying machine learning models. MindsDB provides you with two techniques for this: build and train models as simply as you would write an SQL query, and seamlessly “publish” and manage machine learning models as virtual tables inside your databases (we support Clickhouse, MariaDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MSSQL. MongoDB is coming soon.) We also support getting data from other sources, such as Snowflake, s3, SQLite, and any excel, JSON, or CSV file. When we talk to our growing community, we find that they are using MindsDB for anything ranging from reducing financial risk in the payments sector to predicting in-app usage statistics - one user is even trying to predict the price of Bitcoin using sentiment analysis (we wish them luck). No matter what the use-case, what we hear most often is that the two most painful parts of the whole process are model generation (R&D) and/or moving the model into production. For those who already have models (i.e. who have already done the R&D part), we are launching the ability to bring your own models from frameworks like Pytorch, Tensorflow, scikit-learn, Keras, XGBoost, CatBoost, LightGBM, etc. directly into your database. If you’d like to try this experimental feature, you can sign-up here: ( https://ift.tt/3uhw05U ) We currently have a handful of customers who pay us for support. However, we will soon be launching a cloud version of MindsDB for those who do not want to worry about DevOps, scalability, and managing GPU clusters. Nevertheless, MindsDB will always remain free and open-source, because democratizing machine learning is at the core of every decision we make. We’re making good progress thanks to our open-source community and are also grateful to have the backing of the founders of MySQL & MariaDB. We would love your feedback and invite you to try it out. We’d also love to hear about your experience, so please share your feedback, thoughts, comments, and ideas below. https://ift.tt/3k6zsfm or https://mindsdb.com/ Thanks in advance, Adam & Jorge February 19, 2021 at 10:25PM

Launch HN: HiGeorge (YC W21) – Real-time data visualizations for public datasets https://ift.tt/2NGzfTM

Launch HN: HiGeorge (YC W21) – Real-time data visualizations for public datasets Hi HN! Anuj here. My co-founder Amir (Aazo11) and I are building HiGeorge ( https://hi-george.com/ ). We make localized drag-and-drop data visualizations so that all publishers, even the small ones, can better leverage data in their storytelling. Think Tableau with all the necessary data attached. At the onset of the pandemic Amir and I were looking for local data on the spread of the virus. We visited the sites of large national newsrooms like the NYTimes and were impressed by the quality of data visualizations and maps, but they lacked the geographic granularity for our own neighborhood. We then turned to our local newsrooms but found they presented data in tables and lists that made it difficult to comprehend the virus’ spread and trends. We wondered why. After talking to local journalists and publishers, we found that newsrooms simply do not have the resources to make sense of large datasets. Public datasets are hard to clean, poorly structured, and constantly updated. One publisher explained to us that she would refresh her state health department’s website 5 times a day waiting for updated COVID data, then manually download a CSV and clean it in Excel. This process could take hours, and it needed to happen every day. This is where HiGeorge comes in. We clean and aggregate public datasets and turn them into auto-updating data visualizations that anyone can instantly use with a simple copy/paste. Our data visualizations can be drag-and-dropped into articles, allowing news publishers to offer compelling data content to their communities. Check out a few versions of what we’re doing with customers -- COVID-19 data reporting at North Carolina Health News [1], COVID-19 vaccine site mapping at SFGATE [2], real-time crime reporting in Dallas, TX [3], and police use of force at Mission Local [4]. Today, HiGeorge works with dozens of newsrooms across the country. Our visualizations have driven a 2x increase in pageviews and a 75% increase in session duration for our partner publishers. We charge a monthly subscription for access to our data visualization library – a fraction of the cost of an in-house data engineer. In the long run, we are building HiGeorge so that it becomes the single place to collaborate on and publish data content. We’d love to hear from the HN community and we’ll be hanging out in the comments if you have any questions or feedback. [1] https://ift.tt/3k10ZPa... [2] https://ift.tt/3k8D6oL... [3] https://ift.tt/3aBfXbs... [4] https://ift.tt/2M5IVGZ February 19, 2021 at 09:27PM

Show HN: Archive as you browse, store locally and/or share with others via IPFS https://ift.tt/3qAQ01d

Show HN: Archive as you browse, store locally and/or share with others via IPFS https://archiveweb.page February 19, 2021 at 07:34AM

Virtual Parade and New Central Subway Art Ring in Lunar New Year

Virtual Parade and New Central Subway Art Ring in Lunar New Year
By Sophia Scherr

We are entering the year of the Ox, typically symbolizing hard work, positivity, and honesty. This year the SFMTA will continue the tradition of celebration with the virtual San Francisco Chinese New Year Parade  on February 20th at 6 pm on KTVU.

Celebrating Lunar New Year and the San Francisco Chinese community has been a long-standing tradition for many of us. In 1849, San Francisco’s population swelled to 50,000 and many of the new residents were Chinese immigrants, coming to work in gold mines or on railroad lines. By the 1860’s, the Chinese were eager to share their culture with others and the annual tradition of parade and pageantry was born. A variety of other cultural groups throughout the city were invited to participate, and they marched down what today are Grant Avenue and Kearny Street with colorful flags, banners, lanterns, and drums and firecrackers to drive away evil spirits. The city’s Chinese New Year Parade is one of the largest celebrations of its kind in the world, attracting over three million spectators and television viewers throughout the U.S., Canada and Asia.

In line with what the year of the Ox signifies, we also look forward to seeing our work come to fruition when the Central Subway Project's Chinatown - Rose Pak station opens in 2022. As part of this milestone, the SFMTA in partnership with SFAC’s Public Art Program, the Chinese Culture Center, Chinatown Community Development Center, and the Chinese Historical Society have envisioned a vibrant art program for Chinatown’s station. Three significant prominent artworks by artists Tomie Arai, Yumie Hou and Clare Rojas are being installed, infusing the quintessential Chinatown spirit into their works, connecting the past, present and future. These artworks also serve as wayfinding – from marking the entrance to the station, to signaling to riders their arrival at Chinatown with placement of prominent works on the platform walls.

image of Chinese "paper cut" art

Traditional Chinese paper cut artist Yumei Hou developed large murals that will adorn the station

Ongoing community involvement is an essential to ensuring that Chinatown residents had a role in the artwork design process. The Chinese Cultural Center helped convene community meetings so that the artists would be able to meet residents and receive feedback on their proposed designs. Through this support, artists and community members were able to collaborate on the design of the installations. Artist Tomie Arai was able to work with local photographer Bob Hsiang to photograph students from Gordon J. Lau Elementary School who were then featured in her work.

Central Subway Project outreach staff and their partners at the Chinatown Community Development Center wanted to ensure that all aspects of Chinese culture and art were represented in the art program that will adorn the entryway of the stations roof-top plaza. The center conducted a couplet contest that garnered 120 couplet entries from local, national and international poets. San Francisco poet, Carin Mui was selected, her couplet, a form of Chinese poetry with two lines of verse that have a joined meaning and follow a list of exacting rules reads “In the past, we traveled across the Pacific to mine for gold; Now, we break through earth to form a silver dragon.”

Artist Terry Luk paints the winning couplet for the Chinatown Central Subway Station, as composer Carin Mui, former Chinatown Community Development Center staffer Jerri Diep and former Central Subway Program Manager John Funghi look on.

Artist Terry Luk paints the winning couplet for the Chinatown Central Subway Station, as composer Carin Mui, former Chinatown Community Development Center staffer Jerri Diep and former Central Subway Program Manager John Funghi look on.

 The winning couplet was recently installed in the public plaza above the Chinatown – Rose Pak Station

The winning couplet was recently installed in the public plaza above the Chinatown – Rose Pak Station

Public art in our stations is important not only for its aesthetic or beauty, but helps draw out the identity of a space, aids in the understanding of the historic or cultural significance of a neighborhood and builds a connection between visitor and the surrounding community. It’s an important reminder of the power of art to address the complexity and diversity of neighborhoods and to maintain cultural identity in the face of rapid urban transformation.

 

 



Published February 19, 2021 at 05:24AM
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Show HN: Anti-Cluely – Detect virtual devices and cheating tools on exam systems https://ift.tt/onuTQWR

Show HN: Anti-Cluely – Detect virtual devices and cheating tools on exam systems Anti-Cluely is a lightweight tool designed to detect common...